by SM Stirling
“What the hell? Since when did you speak Lakota, Rudi?”
Artos shrugged. “Rudi didn’t. Artos the First”—he touched the hilt of the Sword—“apparently does. It’s a bit like having a wackin’ great library in your head, I find. Among other things. Though it’s hard to organize it without drowning in knowledge. Things . . . appear when I need them. Well, the Lakota are to be part of the High Kingdom, so the High King should speak their language, eh?”
“Shee,” Rick said, and shook his head.
“Let me show you where you can camp,” Artos said. “And let’s see to your wounded . . . and there’s a big blowout planned, to which you’re all invited.”
The young Sioux leader cocked a hazel eye at him. It had a tint of green in it in certain lights; his mother was called Sungila Win, Fox Woman, from the color of her hair. His tone was dry as he asked:
“You sure about that invitation? ’Cause I headed up here real quick when my great-uncle—”
“The pejula wacasa?”
“Yeah, the scary old dude who did your adoption ceremony . . . anyway, he told me the Spirit People said I’d better make tracks this way quick, and then stick to you like glue for the rest of this war, if I wanted things to turn out right. So I picked up a lot of these guys near the border and they, ah, know their way around here.”
Mathilda snorted laughter. “Now why, why, why would that be, Rick?”
Three Bears looked at her with a crooked smile. “Oh, some of ’em might have come up here to ride around in the dark a little one time or another, maybe stumble across a few horses and cattle . . .”
“. . . and steal them,” Mathilda finished.
“Did I say steal?” He cocked an eye at Father Ignatius, who was quietly telling his rosary. “Wouldn’t want to shock the good Father here.”
The warrior-monk smiled. “My son, I do not shock as easily as you apparently think. Also I am a soldier and a ruler’s advisor, as well as a priest and a monk. And I doubt you need fear that memories of old misdeeds will make you unwelcome tonight. Your riding in with . . . ah, concrete evidence of finishing off most of the raiders who attacked this place put . . . how shall I express this . . . the cherry on the cake for most of the people here.”
Artos chuckled. “Rick, my friend, as High King I officially know nothing of such things. I will not promise these good people that I will stop the Lakota from lifting horses—”
“Even with that Sword, Rudi, you wouldn’t have a prayer. You might as well promise to make rain fall up.”
“That’s one reason. Another . . . have you ever heard of the Táin Bó Cúailnge?”
“No . . . wait a minute, wasn’t that some sort of ancient Irish thing about a big cattle raid?”
“That it is, and a fine rollicking story to boot. It’s also an illustration of why it would ill behoove a Gael to be too sanctimonious about a passion for other people’s livestock. However, I will do nothing whatsoever to stop the Drumhellers from punishing any light-fingered souls they find on their own land absconding with their sheep. Just as I would ignore any protests they made about you dealing with any of their folk you found prowling about your herds.”
“Oh, not sheep. Never sheep. Have you ever tried to make sheep run fast?”
“A point. And there is this; if such persons were to kill anyone in the course of . . . riding around in the dark, shall we say . . . the Drumhellers may hang them, and I will most certainly hang them myself if they make it back to Montival, for the sake of peace between the realms. Exactly as I would insist, on pain of war, that they hang any of their own who did the same to you.”
“Oh. Oh, well, I can see that, sorta.”
“I’m going back to the ranch,” Mathilda said. “Father, would you come with me? I want to confess and be communicated before the feast starts, if it’s not too much trouble.”
“No trouble at all, my daughter,” Ignatius said. His face lit with an impish smile. “Your confessions are rarely very traumatic, you know, my child.”
“Alas,” Artos said and winked at her; she blushed.
“I’ll stay with Rick for a bit,” he said. “See you in a little while, acushla.”
Pitching camp for the Sioux was simply a matter of finding a suitable stretch of prairie, picketing their horses, bringing in a water-cart from the ranch wells, and unrolling their sleeping bags. That done, they trooped down to the lake to wash and began primping for the celebrations, with horseplay and joking about the cooking smells beginning to waft from the barbecue pits. It was well into the long summer twilight by then, when two men walked up to Artos.
Three Bears looked at them casually, then cursed and reached for his shete. Dalan flinched, and Graber put an arm around his shoulders.
Artos laid a hand on Three Bears’ where it rested on the hilt of his blade.
“Quietly, my friend, quietly. You’ll find these men somewhat changed.”
“They threatened my family, on our own land!” the young Sioux leader snarled, pointing at Graber. “He threatened to kill my whole clan, down to the youngest children!”
“And tried his best to kill me and mine, if you’ll recall,” Artos said. “And tried more than once, so he did, and did kill some who were dear to me. Hear them out, for my sake, my friend. And for the world’s.”
Grudgingly, inch by inch, the younger man relaxed. “OK. This better be good, Major Graber. And the High Seeker . . .”
Rick Three Bears was extremely angry, but he was also intelligent and perceptive.
“Is that really him? It’s his face but the . . . the look ’s all wrong. He doesn’t stand or move like that guy, or any of them.”
“It is him and it isn’t,” Artos said. “It’s the boy he was before the Church Universal and Triumphant took hold of him. Before the . . . things . . . that they miscall their Ascended Masters got their claws into his mind.”
“What happened to him?”
“This happened to him,” Artos said grimly, touching the Sword. “It . . . undid that part of his life. And while the man you met deserved to die, this lad has done none of the man’s deeds. Instead he’s trapped inside that man’s body, with all his best years stolen from him.”
“Oh,” Rick Three Bears said, and shivered slightly. “Oh, man, those CUT guys are just . . . they’re just not right.”
Graber nodded to him, then addressed Artos: “My lord, I told you that I had come to believe that the masters of the Church have . . . have betrayed we who served them. I now believe . . . believe that I must turn against them. Go among my own people and try to tell them the truth. I have come to ask your permission for this.”
The man’s face was still a thing carved from granite slabs, but it had a sheen of sweat now, far more than the mild summer evening could account for. He would know, better than most, what that would mean if he failed; and failure was almost certain.
“You can’t believe him!” Three Bears said.
“Graber,” Artos said carefully. “I know you’re telling the truth. No man can lie to me now and be believed. But you served the lords of Corwin for a very long time. The Prophet himself put you on my track. You are . . . marked. And vulnerable to them.”
Bobby Dalan nodded eagerly. “Yes, sir. That’s why I had Major Graber come to you. You can touch him with the Sword like you did me, and then he’ll be safe!”
Safe from anything but inconceivably prolonged torture and death, Artos thought.
Graber met his eyes. “If you would, my lord,” he whispered. “If it can be done without destroying my memories and purpose.”
Artos stood silent for a long moment, looking up into the darkening sky; the first stars were glimmering above the distant eastern horizon, and the moon shone silver.
I did not ask to be a judge of men’s souls.
“I know a little more of the Sword now than I did on Nantucket,” he said at last. “It is the Sword of the Lady, and therefore the Sword of Truth. I can use it to . . . to cleanse your mind,
Graber, and to establish barriers there. But that means that you must confront yourself. Everything that you have been and done, and how those you served were woven into it. You will not lose your years, as Dalan did; but you will see them.”
“Please, my lord,” Graber asked.
There was no point in delay. With a single swift movement he drew the Sword. Three Bears gasped and blinked as it caught the moonlight in its not-steel, but Dalan smiled with an innocent joy. Artos flipped his grip so that he was holding the hilt with the blade pointing down and the pommel above his thumb, then pressed it against the other man’s forehead.
Shock.
A whirling through his own mind, a moment of piercing grief, of sorrow. Then Graber was on his knees, panting and pressing his clenched fists to his temples.
“No, no, I didn’t know, no—”
The mumbling went on and on, until Artos feared the man was mad; the smell of his sweat was heavy and sour. Dalan whimpered and wrung his hands. Then bit by bit Graber gained mastery of himself, staggered erect, braced his shoulders back. He looked to have aged five or ten years in as many minutes, but it was an age like sun-dried jerky or tough rawhide thongs. Whatever else the lords he served had taught him, he had learned a merciless control that Artos could not help but respect. Dalan came beside him, offering a shoulder as a son might, and the older man rested a hand on it.
“Why—” Graber croaked. “Why did you wait until now? I am free, I am free. That was as bitter as death but it freed me. I see . . . I see now. I see it all.”
Tears ran down the hard weathered face, without the man being really aware of them. Artos sheathed the Sword and considered for a moment, his hand on the pommel.
“Because . . .” he said, then began again. “Because I could not do it until you had walked a certain distance along that path yourself, of your own will and choosing and through your own wrestling in the silence within your head. To use the Sword before you had done that would only have broken your mind. A very wise man said to me once that none of us could know what a devil was, or what a devil he himself might be, until he had conquered the devil in himself, and that by hard work. I think you know, now.”
“I . . . it was as if all my life I was living in a story, and then I awoke. And until I did I lived as in an evil dream.”
“That’s what compulsion does. No man can be free, be really himself, unless he makes himself so. Then the Sword could help you. The Lady heals, but She doesn’t enchain; and not even She can make an evil as if it had never been. Now you must make such atonement as you can.”
“Thank you, lord,” Graber said thickly. His face hardened into the bronze mask Artos was familiar with. “I will. Though my life would be no payment, it is still all I have.”
But he is different, as a spear is different when it’s aimed in a new direction.
“I think I understand. Now I understand. Yes, I must do this. Though I die, I must.”
Dalan nodded. “And he’s safe, now. The bad things can’t get into his head anymore.”
“Indeed they can’t,” Artos said grimly. “But their arrows and swords and red-hot irons can.”
Graber managed to smile. “That never frightened me, lord.”
“Rick,” Artos said, turning a little to the Sioux war-chief. “Could you help me with this?”
The whites showed all around Three Bears’ pupils, but he nodded jerkily.
“OK, Rudi. We got plenty of guys who don’t look all that Lakota, whatever their spirits are. We could make these two up like they were ours, and send them back with some of our walking wounded in the next couple of days, so they’d be in position to slip across the border. I know the guy to handle it, too.”
He called and talked to the man, who responded in a quick mixture of English and Lakota that Artos would have had trouble following a year ago. When his follower had led Graber and Dalan away he shook himself and shivered again. His finger wobbled a bit as if he didn’t dare point directly at the sheathed Sword.
“Man, oh, man, that is one fucking scary Wakĥáŋ artifact you got there!”
“My friend, you don’t know the half of it.”
Three Bears fumbled at his belt, rolled a cigarette, and touched it to the flame of a flint-and-steel lighter. He drew and handed it to Artos.
“You sure you can handle it?” he said.
Artos let the smoke out through his nostrils; for once it wasn’t just something to be endured for ceremony’s sake.
“No, I’m not sure,” he said, handing the little burning cylinder back. “Not at all. But I have to do it anyway!”
“Better you than me, dude.”
“And don’t I wish it was anyone but me! There’s one thing I am sure of.”
“Which is?”
“That as soon as I can I’m going to put this”—he slapped the hilt of the Sword—“in an honored place on the wall, and not touch it unless driven by sheer stark necessity. It’s dangerous, that it is; more dangerous to my enemies, which is why I bear it, but . . . it’s too real for the world, I think. It threatens to break the fabric of things just by being, and unravel the story of our lives, as if it were an anchor of cast crucible steel dropped into a world made of gossamer. And we the butterflies among the threads, so.”
“Dude, watch me shudder.”
He did, and drew on the cigarette until the ember underlit his high-cheeked, proud-nosed face.
“I’m just glad you’re on our side.”
“Frankly, so am I. And now I suggest we eat, drink and be merry. For tomorrow—”
“We ride like hell with hemorrhoids, yeah. I better tell my boys not to get too deep into the firewater and forget they’re guests.”
“There’s a fair bit of that advice going around tonight, I think.” Artos laughed. “And much-needed.”
His own gaze went westward, towards the high peaks his mind’s eye knew were there. What was happening beyond the Rockies now? Then he shook his head, and turned towards the lanterns that burned bright all along the walls of the Anchor Bar Seven. Mathilda would be waiting.
He smiled at the thought, and stepped out more quickly.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CROWSNEST PASS
BORDER, DOMINION OF DRUMHELLER /HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL
(FORMERLY BORDER OF ALBERTA AND BRITISH COLUMBIA)
JUNE 7, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD
“Home,” Mathilda breathed.
“Home,” Artos said, then laughed and shouted: “Home,”
He stood in the stirrups, and Epona reared beneath him. The Sword flashed free—
Shock.
The moment stretched, and he saw.
Mounted warriors fought on a grassy plain that rolled upward towards forested mountains, their swords glinting in the bright sunlight. A white road lined with poplars smoked dust as a long train of wagons passed, leaving the powder heavy on the fresh green leaves of the trees and the yellowing grain behind. A couple made love in a haymow beneath the roof of a barn whose rafters were carved in sinuous running knotwork. A big dog and a five-year-old wearing nothing but a kilt and his own gold curls stamped and romped gleefully along the edge of a pond and ducks avalanched into the sky. A man with silvery stubble on his cheeks crouched in a dark stinking alley and clutched a bottle, whispering a name as he sobbed and rocked. A woman squinted as she leaned into the tiller of a gaff-rigged fishing boat; dolphins broached from the whitecapped waves around her as she called sharply: Haul away and sheet her home! A smith took a piece from the coals between his tongs and considered its white-red glow as he reached for his hammer. A tiger woke in a den on the slopes of a snow-topped mountain and lifted its head from huge paws, yawning, stretching until its claws slid free, its red tongue curling over ivory daggers . . .
“Rudi, where were you?” Mathilda asked, her face anxious.
He looked at the blade and smiled at her; he blinked against what he recognized with astonishment were tears.
“I was . . . everywhere. Eve
rywhere in this land of ours, Matti, acushla, and I was the folk and the trees and the beasts and the land itself. Oh, and it’s beautiful, our Montival, a land fit for Gods and giants and heroes!”
“I hope we can make it a good land to live in,” she said soberly, still darting a cautious glance at the Sword. “For just plain people.”
“It’s not all bad, what the Sword does,” he said gently. “And we shall do just that, so.”
Then he laughed again as he sheathed it. “And right now, we’re riding up to Castle Corbec. We’re home, Matti, the two of us, and summer is coming, and the harvest of our hopes.”
Mountains lifted all around them, thickly forested with lodgepole pine and Douglas fir and clumps of aspen. Hills rolled down to the road bright with green grass, and a cool wind blew from the naked granite teeth of the heights, clean and scented with conifer-sap; snow glittered on the higher peaks. In the near distance a herd of elk took fright and leapt over the remains of a ruined fence, heading higher into the hills. Then they came over a rise, and the border fort was before them.
To the right of the roadway was a long blue lake that lapped against cliffs northward, and to the left the land rose rapidly. Ahead the highway crossed an arm of the water on a pre-Change bridge at one narrow spot where the flood turned emerald-green. Castle Corbec reared on a hill just before it, faced in hard pale mountain stone over its concrete and baring fangs of crenellation at heaven with water on two sides and a moat around; southward a waterfall brawled down a mountainside, thread-tiny in the distance.
“Looking as if it had been there forever and not just fifteen years, so it does,” he said.
Twin round towers with pointed roofs flanked the gatehouse, and flying from the spike atop one was . . .
“Arra, that’s even quicker work,” Artos said.
It was the green-silver-blue flag of Montival, the crowned mountain and the Sword, in pride of place above the other banners.
“That’s my mom,” Mathilda said proudly. “Bet you there’s thousands more like it all over the kingdom now, and not just in Association territory.”
